Enders In Exile by Unknown Read Free Book Online

more danger.
    Even if I had known the
war was real, I would have tried to do exactly what I did.
    So in his mind he now
asked the hive queens, over and over, though he knew they were dead and
could not answer: Why?
    Why did you decide to
let me kill you?
    His rational mind
introduced all the other possibilities—including the chance
that perhaps they were really quite stupid. Or perhaps they had so
little experience at running a society of equals that they were unable
to reach a rational decision together. Or, or, or, or, over and over he
ran through possible explanations.
    Ender's study now, when
he wasn't pursuing the schoolwork that someone—Graff, still?
Or Graff's rivals?—kept assigning him, was to read over the
reports from the soldiers that he had once unknowingly commanded. On
every formic colony world, humans now walked. And from every
exploratory team the reports were the same: All the formics dead and
rotting, with vast farms and factories now available for the taking.
The soldiers-turned-explorers were always alert to the possibility of
ambush,
but as the months passed and there were no attacks, their reports
became full of the things they were learning from the xenobiologists
that had been sent with them: Not only can we breathe the air on every
formic world, we can eat most of their food.
    And so every formic
planet became a human colony, the soldiers settling down to live among
the relics of their enemies. There were not enough women among them,
but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize
reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of
mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual
proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of
monogamy could be restored.
    But Ender took only
peripheral interest in what the humans were doing on the new worlds.
What he studied were the formic artifacts. The patterns of formic
settlement. The warrens that had once been the hive queens' breeding
grounds, full of larvae that were so hard-toothed they could gnaw
through rock, creating more and more tunnels. They had to farm on the
surface, but they went underground to breed, to raise their young, and
the young themselves were every bit as lethal and powerful as the
adults. Chewing through rock—the explorers found the larval
bodies, rotting quickly but still there to be photographed, dissected,
studied.
    "So this is how you
spend your days," said Petra. "Looking at pictures of formic tunnels.
Is this a return-to-the-womb thing?"
    Ender smiled and set
aside the pictures he had been studying. "I thought you'd already gone
home to Armenia."
    "Not till I see how
this stupid court martial turns out," she said. "Not until the Armenian
government is ready to receive me in high style. Which means they have
to decide whether they want me."
    "Of course they want
you."
    "They don't know what
they want. They're politicians. Is it good for them to have me back? Is
keeping me up here
worse
for them than having me
come home? It's so very, very hard when you have no convictions except
your lust to remain in power. Aren't we glad we're not in politics?"
    Ender sighed.
"É. I will never hold office again. Commander of Dragon Army
was too much for me, and that was just a kids' game."
    "That's what I tried to
assure them. I don't want anybody's job. I'm not
going to endorse anybody for office. I want to live with my family and
see if they remember who I am. And vice versa."
    "They'll love you,"
said Ender.
    "And you know this
because . . . ?"
    "Because
I
love you."
    She looked at him in
consternation. "How can I possibly answer a comment like
that
?"
    "Oh. What was I
supposed to say?"
    "I don't know. Am I
supposed to write scripts for you now?"
    "OK," said Ender.
"Should it have been banter? 'They'll love you because somebody has to,
and it sure isn't anybody up here.' Or maybe the ethnic slur: 'They'll
love you because hey, they're Armenian and you're a female.' "
    "What